Pulse / Impulse The Art of Robert Behrens by Gary Dwyer

Pulse / Impulse

Robert Behrens Robert Behrens the

Art of

Gary Dwyer - Editor

Pulse / Impulse the Art of

Robert Behrens

Gary Dwyer - Editor Published by Angstrom Unit Works Text Copyright © 2012 Gary Dwyer. All rights reserved. Photographs unless otherwise noted, © 2012 Estate of Robert Behrens No Part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. This book was composed using: LeArchitect, Univers LT std and Minion Pro. Warning and Disclaimer This book is designed to provide information to photographers, curators, arts administrators and students Every effort has been made to make this book complete and accurate as possible, but no warranty of fitness is implied. The information is provided on an as-is basis. The author and publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book. ISBN 978-0-9849639-3-5 Cover Photograph: Pulse / Impulse drawing © 2012 Estate of Robert Behrens Further information about the editor is available on the web: garydwyerphotography.com

Purpose This book is dedicated to the memory of Robert Behrens. Let’s start this out by saying I am not a biographer, I am only trying not to forget a great friend. Even so, I have all the problems of a real biographer. Along with what is included here there are many missing pieces, wrong dates, misstated facts, ignorance, and obliviousness to obvious truths. And I ask forgiveness for these faults. I have included almost no mention of Robert’s personal relationships and this is intentional. It is to protect the living. Their stories are profound and I don’t want to get any aspect of those stories wrong. I know a lot of anecdotal stories my own about Robert, but I really know nothing except our friendship and what I saw in him and in his work. Those individuals who have made substantial contributions to this project are Gaeta Stratton Marga Friberg (Robert’s partner and collaborator for more than 25 years) Peter Conrad Tea and Faye Behrens. Individual photographic contributions are attributed adjacent to the images.

Robert Behrens 1939 - 2008

Denver Technological Center H20 Works 1971

My name is Robert Behrens. I have worked as an environmental sculptor since I graduated from University of Denver in 1968. My love has been to create beautiful spaces through sculpture, landscape or architecture. I have always worked in sculpture in the public realm. Most all of my work is rooted both psychologically and physically in its place. My pieces canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be moved. Many have foundations underground almost as large as the sculpture which is seen. The first period of my work was in wood, large pressure treated wood. The second period was in steel. These steel pieces often were then covered with diffraction grading, a mylar that diffracts sunlight into spectral light. The colors change as the observer changes location. This makes every viewers experience unique. Most of my work is additive, smaller pieces of material combined in space to make a whole. Over many years, through my own work and through the collaborations that I have done with G Cabell Childress, Architect, I have observed that there are different scales of sculpture. For each individual piece to be successful, it must address the scale of the physical place and the pace of the people who inhabit that space. Scale 1; Intimate, the art can be small, the spaces which the artwork inhabits are smaller either by their physical nature, by the density of people or from the slowness of speed which people move through the space. The distance from the observer to the artwork is small and the observer can recognize, be detained and take time to contemplate the emotional experience conveyed through the piece of work. Scale 2: Architectural : The artwork can respond to a space formed by the interior or the exterior of buildings or walls. The work, by its confirmation, can make the observer or a person moving through a space more aware of their own movement and in doing so bring an observer into the experience of a work of art. The volume formed by the space itself is more defined and enhanced by the successful artwork. Scale 3; Monumental, An artwork becomes the landmark for a point in space. The physical environs can be large, even a landscape. To be successful at this scale a piece must be large enough to be read from a distance and focus the observerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s energy. The artwork makes a focus in itself and makes a statement as to a point in space. My work is in Scale 2 and 3. My hope is that seeing my work will inspire other sculptors to think about public art works and how they influence the lives of all those who move and work around those pieces. Our cities and cultures are only as great as those places of beauty that survive the individual. I wish everyone peace and beauty. Robert Behrens

Pueblo, Colorado circa 1971

University of Denver Denver, Colorado 1972

Wood Construction, Denver Art Museum Denver, Colorado 1972

At 2 AM the phone rang. It was Robert, and he said, “I’ve got all the streets blocked off with police cars and a crane with my five-ton sculpture dangling from the hook. The problem is that we can’t stop it from spinning around and if we just set it down it will break in half. (slight pause) You’re the only guy I know that can figure this out, has a welding truck and will come down to the museum in the middle of the night to do a little steel work.” I said, “Keep, those police lights flashing, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” -Editor

Before we go any further we have to get a few things straight... Artists lives in America are usually crap. Particularly visual artists. Occasionally glamorous on the outside, but on the inside filled with unstable relationships, confusion and angst. If an artist decides to make Public Art, then they are saddled with clients aspirations, building codes and an almost unimaginable morass of problems never confronted by any artist who works only in their studio. Robert and I grew up in an era when we thought art could change the world. It turns out that all art can change is the artist. After having completed twenty-five year os of sculpture on three continents I can say that Public art is a particularly malodorous place to play. It rumbles around in the regions between deceptions and despair, and later, the neglect of the work, even destruction or disappearance occurs. It is no place for dilettantes. I first met Robert Behrens in 1969 on the first day of Graduate School at the University of Denver. We were two of the three students enrolled for Master’s degrees in sculpture. The facilities for making sculpture at the University were pathetic and I think that one of the reasons I was admitted to the program was that I had my own studio. It was a beat up garage / barn with a dirt floor on the outskirts of Denver, but at least it was something the University didn’t have to provide. Robert had his own studio too. It was adjacent to his home in rural Evergreen. He had built both his home and the studio. Either that or made major renovations so it was visible that a modernist architect had come to the mountains of Colorado, even if it was via New Jersey, Kansas City, and numerous other places. The third sculptor in our group was A. Thomas Schomberg. The following clip from his web site should give an indication of his very creative life:

“The sculpture career of A. Thomas Schomberg has spanned the last four decades of creativity in which Schomberg has described, with his realistic intensity, the time and environment in which he lives and the society that we are all captives of. Schomberg grew up in America’s Midwest - Iowa during the 1940’s and 50’s. After studying for a short time in Europe and completing an M.F.A. (master of fine arts) degree, plus additional post graduate study, Schomberg then moved to the east coast and taught for four years in a progressive community college. Though he received tenure, he felt compelled to relocate to Colorado in 1975 and establish Schomberg studios. Since then, Schomberg and his wife, Cynthia, who is also his agent, have worked together to pursue Schomberg’s career as a professional sculptor. Several years later and after countless exhibits, Schomberg established a strong client base. Numbered among these clients and collectors are blue collar workers, entrepreneurs, museum directors/curators, professional athletes and movie stars, including Sylvester Stallone. Stallone went on to Select Schomberg to create what was later to become the iconic ROCKY statue for the movie, ‘Rocky I I I’. http://www.schombergstudios.com/ The three of us were graduate teaching assistants and taught first year basic design. Because all of us had some prior teaching experience we were pretty much left alone, to our own devices, and so much so that Robert and I decided to team-teach. The classes were in an old post office that had been divided into two big rooms. Robert and I decided it would be better if there were one big room, so we worked with the students to cut a sixteen-foot diameter hole in the dividing wall. The administration was not pleased with our activities, but since we were saving the University a lot of money by teaching a lot of classes, we had quite a lot of latitude. We had almost no guidance or mentoring. Being left alone meant we spent a lot of time together talking about our own work as artists and what was going on in the art world. We spent a lot of time reading art magazines from New York and agonizing about Denver being a kind of cultural backwater at the time.

Tom Schomberg came to get his masters degree in sculpture because he wanted to be a sculptor. I had come to attempt a Master’s in sculpture because I wanted to teach at the university level and to make a bridge between landscape architecture and sculpture. Robert’s background in architecture had many similarities to mine and consequently we hit it off right away. All architects want to be sculptors, but Robert was the only sculptor I ever met who wanted to be an architect. Many of his projects are that very sophisticated and ill-defined space between urban design, landscape architecture and large scale sculpture. He was as interested in making spaces and experiences as he was in making objects. He had the architects fanaticism about detail while always having an eye out for how to make the project bigger, to have more influence, to engage a wider audience. Of the three of us, Robert had established the most consistent form language. A signature of rectangular members rotated in space. Tom, on the other hand, was obviously trained classically and had a profound interest in the human form but was working in many directions at the time, serious social commentary pervading many of his efforts. My thesis project was for the central campus plaza of Colorado Academy and led to my collaboration with Robert on an ‘Art as Urban Design’ project for the City of Littleton, Colorado. Robert always wanted to be something other than what he was. He wanted to be an architect, but refused to accept the responsibility and drudgery and hierarchy that went along with it. He wanted to be a collaborator on everything, but his ego always got in his way and got in everyone else’s way too. He disliked me for my being a security freak for looking for and finding stable jobs at various Universities. He thought I should be able to push a button and get him some cushy adjunct professorship with a guaranteed salary and the freedom to make sculpture on his own. He never wanted to do all the ass kissing and shit eating I had to do to get those not-so-cushy University jobs.

Robert was a geometry and symmetry freak. He was educated during the modernist period and design was simply modernist dogma. Robert thought he was an original, singular, one-off. I never remember him speaking of influences. Of course he knew about Larry Bell and George Rickey and Mies van der Rohe and all the Bauhaus geniuses, but somehow he didn’t seem to think they had any effect on him. These people might have been in his brain, but he never seemed to bow in the direction or Kenneth Snelson and James Turrell. Dale Eldred < en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Eldred > http://168.144.121.83/cultureport/artists/eldred/ index.htm at the Kansas City Art Institute was a huge influence and Robert gave him homage all the time. It could be argued that Dale Eldred was the single most powerful influence in Robert’s artistic life. Robert loved to build models of his projects and he could see himself walking through the spaces he created. Robert always wanted to have things line up. Rectangles were a big deal. Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics ruled Robert’s world. It was the revenge of modernism and contemporary materials used at an architectural scale. He couldn’t be a stone carver if it would save his life. He demanded industrial perfection in everything he did and couldn’t tolerate anything but excellence from those he worked with. He used his soft voice to be demanding. He was often a huge pain in the ass. In the middle of an argument he had a way of cracking a quick smile just as he was about to bludgeon his opponent. He was not just tenacious, he was so very stubborn - but he had that smile. I still miss him.

- Editor

GOING, GOING--GONE By Michael Paglia in WESTWORD - Denver published: September 27, 1995 (Exerpt) Lately, and increasingly, museums across the country and around the world have begun “deaccessioning”--selling off parts of their existing collections as a ready source of “free money” to pay for new acquisitions. It’s money, more than art, that’s hard for many of these institutions to come by, especially in recent years, as private and public funding sources have dried up right and left. So it’s easy to understand the temptation for museum directors to clean out their storerooms and cash in. Not to be left out, the Denver Art Museum is currently in the midst of an unprecedented deaccession campaign, which reached a kind of crescendo with the September 16 on-premises auction conducted by the prominent New York-based Christie’s auction house. At the allday event, DAM divested itself of some 1,500 articles sold in more than 600 lots. Even under ideal circumstances--which this was--the process of getting rid of once-treasured works of art is filled with pitfalls. It does break a faith with donors. And it comes with a checkered history: Scandal, or at least controversy, has accompanied deaccessioning efforts more often than not in the museum world… One deaccession decision made by the museum inadvertently puts the institution square in the middle of another debate--this one over the place of public art in our city. Almost from the 1971 opening of DAM’s current home--the distinctive building designed by Gio Ponti and James Sudler--the corner in front of the museum was marked by a large minimalist sculpture, “Untitled (Environmental Fan Sculpture),” by Robert Behrens, an artist who worked briefly in Denver. The sculpture was commissioned by the museum for the site, but because Behrens donated his time, DAM only sprang for the cost of materials. It’s understandable why this piece sold to a prominent local collector for just $1,380--few people would have the space to display the piece, which is the size of a small house. Today, in place of the fan sculpture, is a garden installation by Meg Webster. This is progress?

One thing the DAM presumably wouldn’t get rid of, if it had the choice, is the 1981 “Solar Fountain,” by internationally known artists Larry Bell and Eric Orr, which sits on the barren lawn of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. But the DCPA, unlike the museum, hasn’t yet reached the point of being professionally organized, and there the director calls all the shots. That enthusiastic (and autocratic) amateur, Donald Seawell, is not so careful about such things, and he’s decided the fountain must go. As a result, the fountain, which has already been sold down the river by the kangaroo Mayor’s Commission on Art, Culture and Film will surely soon be gone, to be replaced by a park. The only person with the power to grant it a reprieve is Mayor Wellington Webb. It is to laugh. The passing of the fountain may not be mourned by more than a few, but it’s hardly an artistic embarrassment. Its style is completely compatible with the DCPA buildings. And if this example of solar art never quite worked as it was supposed to, neither did solar energy. The disappearance of both the fan sculpture and the fountain makes one wonder if any public art in Denver from the 1970s or 1980s will manage to survive into the next century. Most likely not--though much of the city’s more recent public art, with more questionable credentials than the older stuff, probably will. It’s doubly sad that the official disregard for Colorado art exemplified by the DAM auction extends even to works by out-of-towners that had the bad fortune to wind up here. The best example of that comes not from the world of art but from architecture: the pending destruction of I.M. Pei’s Zeckendorf Plaza. Oh, well. Denver has never been known for its important public art or architecture. Given current events, it never will be.

Even though both Robert and I had experience in urban design and architecture, it was in the realm of sculpture that we felt most comfortable. The problem is that we really liked working on extremely big sculpture projects. The then small town of Littleton Colorado was interested in re-vitalizing its image and contacted Robert and myself to determine if revitalization was possible by the town becoming known for its art collection. Not by what they had in a gallery of museum, but what they had on the streets and sidewalks. This was before the idea of “Public Art Programs” had become common and seemed a novel idea worth investigating. The scale of the endeavor was unlimited and it was possible to make suggestions for vast changes and minor improvements. The real goal was to use art to put the town back on the map.

I say back on the map because it was once an important grain milling town attending to the needs of the farmers in the region, but like many if not all American river towns, there was a significant period when these towns turned their backs on the very rivers that caused the towns to come into existence. Much of it was connected to the rise of the railroads and truck transport, but it wasn’t until well after Cleveland’s Cuyahoga river caught on fire in 1969 that we began to change the relationship between our rivers and towns. Suggesting sculptures to be placed on the sidewalks was not going to solve this problem, nor was it going to make the town into an art Mecca for tourists. This was originally published in the 2007 book “Context” By Gary Dwyer

- Editor

The most vexing problem of towns adjacent to rivers and streams is what to do in or on the floodplain. In this case, The Army Corps of Engineers said it would cost 14 Million dollars (1971) to channelize (i.e. pave) that portion of the floodplain most likely to flood the town. Our proposal was to take the fourteen million dollars and buy the floodplain and turn it into a park. Any flooding would cause very minimal damage to any structures. (Our design for the park was not accomplished, but I understand the floodplain was purchased. Years later I learned the same idea was accomplished in Canberra, Australia.)

During the last fifty years, substantial manufacturing plants located nearby needed to periodically discharge waste steam. We thought this would ad visual interest to the river until we realized this would raise the temperature of the river and damage the habitat. However we also discovered it was necessary to periodically bleed the compressed air tanks at several plants and the installation of a series of pipes in the river bottom could provide a kind of air fountain and actually improve the water quality through the added oxygenation.

The primary component in visibility is contrast and the best way to make someone see something is by having something where it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t belong. The bow-tie on the dog system. As it nears Denver, the South Platte is normally a brown river. Raging in the spring and mild mannered in the fall, but almost always brown. The Addition of bright colors and movement would go a long way to increasing awareness that the river was actually a vibrant and important part of the community. 19

The largest forms constructed for the least amount of money are made of earth. Dirt has certain gravitational rules, but retaining walls are very inexpensive and are very cost effective. Landscape as play equipment. Note to the art history savvy: This design was produced before any of the earthworks of people like Herbert Bayer or Robert Morris.

One of the most hotly debated issues among those concerned with the â&#x20AC;&#x153;qualityâ&#x20AC;? of the landscape is whether we should make the highway driving experience as pleasant as possible or we should make it as horrible as possible in order to discourage driving individual cars. No matter which side of this issue you stand, everyone agrees the noise from highways is a negative addition to our communities. Solid masonry is the only thing that stops sound and as cars and trucks will continue to pass through our towns and cities, artists should be hired to design the walls. (See the left side of this image.)

Inevitable conflicts between pedestrians and road and rail traffic are seldom handled with any grace. Most often a pedestrian underpass is to be avoided as a place of darkness, danger and urine. Clean, open and well lit, this example is intended to be reminiscent of the cavernous Colorado mines, but this time, with an opening at the other end.

Western towns seldom have any sense of edge or boundary. Particularly those in flatlands and as a consequence, there is often no sense of entry or exit and it is difficult to know very much about where you are. We decided a large earth form cut through by the main road would provide the kind of visual punctuation necessary to announce the entrance to the town.

Littleton, Colorado 1971

Direct interaction with the river was essential to improving the relationship between the river and the town and if we were going to have a pedestrian bridge to solve a circulation problem, it should also be an event, a destination. Going upstream, against the current, contrary to logic, an enormous jet of intermittent water passes over the pedestrian bridge. Yes, some people get wet. You take your chances.

Traffic triangles in America are some of the least developed and most ignored urban spaces. We would do well to look to England and France to see what they have done with many of their roundabouts. This triangle in Denver was a competition instigated by the city in conjunction with the adjacent Cherry Creek Shopping Center. I have no recollection why I was selected for the commission. The basin is eighteen inches deep to conform with public safety code of the time. (1972) Notice the unscripted child in the foreground is running toward the water.

Druidâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Drinking Fountain Denver, Colorado 1972-74 This project was designed by Gary Dwyer with contract documents and construction supervision by Robert Behrens

The pointy upward bits fountain are a rather obvious reference to the Rockies being this regionsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; most important source of water. A major consideration in the design of this fountain was the intention to have it left on during the winter so it would freeze and make icicle sculptures. I have visited in winter and it was turned off. I have never seen a photograph to indicate that this has icicle idea has ever happened.

Earth Crystal Denver 1974

Picnic Shelters Cherry Creek Reservoir, Colorado 1975